Big Changes At White Wolf Following Controversy

Following an online backlash regarding the content of their recent publications, White Wolf Publishing has just announced some big changes, including the suspension of the Vampire 5th Edition Camarilla and Anarch books, and a restructuring of management.

White Wolf's Shams Jorjani made the following announcement about an hour ago:

"Hello everyone,

My name is Shams Jorjani, VP of Business Development at Paradox Interactive and interim manager at White Wolf Publishing. I wanted to inform you of some changes that will be implemented at White Wolf, starting immediately.

Sales and printing of the V5 Camarilla and Anarch books will be temporarily suspended. The section on Chechnya will be removed in both the print and PDF versions of the Camarilla book. We anticipate that this will require about three weeks. This means shipping will be delayed; if you have pre-ordered a copy of Camarilla or Anarchs, further information will follow via e-mail.

In practical terms, White Wolf will no longer function as a separate entity. The White Wolf team will be restructured and integrated directly into Paradox Interactive, and I will be temporarily managing things during this process. We are recruiting new leadership to guide White Wolf both creatively and commercially into the future, a process that has been ongoing since September.

Going forward, White Wolf will focus on brand management. This means White Wolf will develop the guiding principles for its vision of the World of Darkness, and give licensees the tools they need to create new, excellent products in this story world. White Wolf will no longer develop and publish these products internally. This has always been the intended goal for White Wolf as a company, and it is now time to enact it.

The World of Darkness has always been about horror, and horror is about exploring the darkest parts of our society, our culture, and ourselves. Horror should not be afraid to explore difficult or sensitive topics, but it should never do so without understanding who those topics are about and what it means to them. Real evil does exist in the world, and we can’t ever excuse its real perpetrators or cheapen the suffering of its real victims.

In the Chechnya chapter of the V5 Camarilla book, we lost sight of this. The result was a chapter that dealt with a real-world, ongoing tragedy in a crude and disrespectful way. We should have identified this either during the creative process or in editing. This did not happen, and for this we apologize.

We ask for your patience while we implement these changes. In the meantime, let’s keep talking. I’m available for any and all thoughts, comments and feedback, on shams.jorjani@paradoxinteractive.com."

White Wolf is currently own by Paradox Interactive, who acquired the World of Darkness rights in 2015 from previous owner CCP (who you might know from Eve Online) whose plans for a WoD MMO failed to bear fruit.

The recent Camarilla and Anarch books have met widespread criticism. The former, Camarilla, includes a section which appears to trivialise current real-life events in Chechnya, where the LGBTQ community is being persecuted, tortured, and murdered and uses that current tragedy as a backdrop for the setting. This comes after the company was forced to deny links to neo-Nazi ideology. White Wolf recently announced that "White Wolf is currently undergoing some significant transitions up to and including a change in leadership. The team needs a short time to understand what this means, so we ask for your patience as we figure out our next steps" and this appears to be the result of that decision.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I think the term most usually used in the context of portraying all sides of an evil human (thereby softening their overall image) these days is “normalizing”.

I think people these days who worry about softening the image of evil need to re-read Hannah Arendt.

 

[Morrus]

* Off-topic. About Lolita. For American Law is abuse all relations with underage teens, but in another countries may allowed, for example in Spain was allowed since 13y (if it was consensual, of course) but now the limit is 16y. There was a controversy in France about a new law because there may be a open door for relations with underage teens. Centuries ago a 16y girl marrying wasn't too rare. In the pre-Christian classical Greek-Roman civilization relations with underage wasn't so forbidden. Our biology tells us teen girls are in the best time to procreate, but we can't, we shouldn't, because they aren't ready yet for serious relations. True men want complete women with enough psychological maturity and emotional intelligence. Young girls are beautiful as an art picture, we can watch them but not touching them. They deserve to know the true love, innocent and pure, and not to be used like a toy or hunt trophy by a perverted. A teenage girl who only wants to have fun but not to grow as person is really sad.

In addition to my repeated warnings that this isn't a random political soapbox thread, this is *really* inappropriate. Don't post again in this thread please.

And for everybody else, I repeat: stay on topic. If you start introducing unrelated political or religious topics, you'll be asked to leave the thread.

 

[Maxperson]

Sure. But they aren't *legally required* to do that. When this happens, it happens by choice.

This should not be surprising. Individual people can have a conscience, or feel empathy. But when humans act as groups (corporation, political party, college fraternity, sci-fi convention committee, or whatever) we often find it a struggle to be empathetic, or apply conscience and thoughtfulness on a consistent basis.

Groups like churches, the Red Cross, Amnesty International, United Way, Habitat for Humanity, people protesting bad things, and so on? Individuals feel compassion or not, and organized groups are made up of individuals who feel compassion or not. Mobs, rioters, looters, etc. are examples of groups where ordinarily compassionate people can be caught up in something that causes a loss of compassion, but it's much rarer in organized groups, which tend to draw like minded people.

Corporate leadership is a group that has a great many people who just don't have much, if any compassion. 3x as many true psychopaths are in corporate management than are in the general population, and if you relax the standard, many others have some traits along those lines, so compassion is much lower over a much larger percentage of people in control of businesses.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/victor...ween-psychopathy-and-leadership/#57cd0234104a

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/1-in-5-ceos-are-psychopaths-australian-study-finds/

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm sorry, you're saying that an exercise of empathy is immoral? Normally it's the withholding and discouragement of empathy that is quite obviously completely unacceptable morally. You have to go pretty far to find a theory of moral philosophy that says, "Yes, it is okay to be selective about with whom you empathize; you should only empathize with certain types of people."

I think part of the confusion may like in your conflating empathy with sympathy. They are not the same thing. To empathize with someone is to understand their thoughts and feelings. To sympathize is to share them. They are so different as to sometimes work at cross purposes. Triumph of the Will is made to evoke sympathy for Hitler, and does so by dehumanizing him, building up his image as an over-man, beyond good and evil, above the weaknesses and follies that the rest of us share. Downfall demolishes that image, and any temptation one might feel to follow his ideology, precisely by exposing his all-too-human pride and rage and despair for our examination.

(Something's ringing a bell... oh, yes, Nietzsche! There's one place you can find an anti-empathetic moral theory. What a coincidence that I should be reminded of that here.)

With Morrus’ warning, I won’t dig deeper into this than we have. All I’ll say is, humanizing real world monsters isn’t helpful. We have no need of individual empathy toward Polanski, Hitler, etc.

As that relates to the topic, we should not be minimizing real world evil by turning into supernatural evil and conspiracy theories.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

With Morrus’ warning, I won’t dig deeper into this than we have. All I’ll say is, humanizing real world monsters isn’t helpful. We have no need of individual empathy toward Polanski, Hitler, etc.

As that relates to the topic, we should not be minimizing real world evil by turning into supernatural evil and conspiracy theories.

I'm getting some serious whiplash here. "Evil people should not be portrayed as human"; "Evil people should not be portrayed as inhuman". Pick one.

 

[billd91]

A story that humanizes Polanski would be a story that literally elicits empathy for a real world child rapist. That should quite obviously be completely unacceptable, morally.

But that’s not the only thing Roman Polanski is. He’s also a Holocaust survivor and the widow of a famously murdered wife and father of a murdered unborn child - all of which are worth of sympathy as his rape commission is worthy of scorn. Humans are famously complex, perhaps complex enough that it’s hard to pigeonhole them as just one thing with just one approach.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm getting some serious whiplash here. "Evil people should not be portrayed as human"; "Evil people should not be portrayed as inhuman". Pick one.

Any whiplash is on you. I’ve put forth no contradictions. The two are completely different things.

But that’s not the only thing Roman Polanski is. He’s also a Holocaust survivor and the widow of a famously murdered wife and father of a murdered unborn child - all of which are worth of sympathy as his rape commission is worthy of scorn. Humans are famously complex, perhaps complex enough that it’s hard to pigeonhole them as just one thing with just one approach.

Do you remember the context of Polanski being brought up? We’re talking about the hypothetical of Lolita, but about Polanski. You wanna make a biopic thst doesn’t shy away from or minimize what he did, fine. I’m not going to give you any money for it, but I won’t go any further than that. You make a movie about his interactions with teenage girls that humanizes him, and I’m going to protest and decry that terrible decision quite vociferously.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Any whiplash is on you. I’ve put forth no contradictions. The two are completely different things.

Did you notice how, when I pointed out the difference between empathy and sympathy earlier, I actually went on to explain what the difference was and how it was relevant?

Do you remember the context of Polanski being brought up? We’re talking about the hypothetical of Lolita, but about Polanski. You wanna make a biopic thst doesn’t shy away from or minimize what he did, fine. I’m not going to give you any money for it, but I won’t go any further than that. You make a movie about his interactions with teenage girls that humanizes him, and I’m going to protest and decry that terrible decision quite vociferously.

I think there's some sort of difference in definitions going on here. What do you mean by "humanizing"? You speak of "humanizing" Polanski like that's synonymous with "shying away from or minimizing what he did". But as far as I can see, humanizing him is the only way not to shy away from or minimize what he did. Not to repeat myself, but he is in fact human. The terrible decisions he made were the result of human cognition and emotion. So if you're putting him in your work, you can either (a) portray that cognition and emotion accurately and thereby "humanize" him; or (b) obscure that cognition and emotion to "dehumanize" him, thereby shying away from the truth of his actions. I think (b) is bad. And I think it's bad for exactly the same reason that it's bad to pin the blame for Chechnyan atrocities on hypnotic vampires: it implicitly shifts responsibility away from recognizable and controllable human impulses onto some unreal scapegoat that is comfortably distant from and unbeholden to us.

So that's what I mean when I speak of "humanization". But clearly you mean something different, and I don't understand what it is.

 

[Umbran]

While our games have monsters, in the real world, we just have people. Every monstrous thing done in history was done by a human being.

Failing to see monsters as people means you won't recognize them for what they are. "Oh, he couldn't be like that! He was such a nice man!" And every time you lump human monstrosity under some other name, (like "mentally ill") you add to ill-informed preconceptions that hurt more people than they help.

You cannot prevent monstrosity unless you understand it, and to do that you must look at it as truthfully as possible.

That doesn't mean you forgive.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Did you notice how, when I pointed out the difference between empathy and sympathy earlier, I actually went on to explain what the difference was and how it was relevant?

Sure. In normal common everyday speech, "humanization" bespeaks more "make the subject more sympathetic" than "remind people that the subject is literally a human".
Ie, in that usage, you can remind people that the nazis were, entirely, without exception, human, without humanizing them.
So, given that usage, humanizing "monsters" is, at best, misguided, IMO.
At the same time, taking a real world monstrous human, and making them literally supernatural (or directly influenced by the supernatural to do what makes them monstrous), mythologizes them in a way that makes what they did seem less real.
IF it is somehow done in a way that doesn't change the motives and impact of the actions, there is room for it to be acceptable. In this example, there could have been room to have this be something that is simply affecting vampires, too, rather than something that is "happening to cover for vampire activities".

So, yes, humanizing evil people is bad, and making real world monsters into fantasy monsters is going to generally be bad, if you aren't careful about it. There is a nuance I left out before regarding whether doing so makes the point of the actions of the monster into a fantasy trope or if it remains as human a tragedy.

I think there's some sort of difference in definitions going on here. What do you mean by "humanizing"? You speak of "humanizing" Polanski like that's synonymous with "shying away from or minimizing what he did". But as far as I can see, humanizing him is the only way not to shy away from or minimize what he did. Not to repeat myself, but he is in fact human. The terrible decisions he made were the result of human cognition and emotion. So if you're putting him in your work, you can either (a) portray that cognition and emotion accurately and thereby "humanize" him; or (b) obscure that cognition and emotion to "dehumanize" him, thereby shying away from the truth of his actions. I think (b) is bad. And I think it's bad for exactly the same reason that it's bad to pin the blame for Chechnyan atrocities on hypnotic vampires: it implicitly shifts responsibility away from recognizable and controllable human impulses onto some unreal scapegoat that is comfortably distant from and unbeholden to us.

So that's what I mean when I speak of "humanization". But clearly you mean something different, and I don't understand what it is.

Humanizing Polanski is misguided, IMO, because there is no need. I don't even believe that people actually forget in any meaningful way that Hitler was human, much less Polanski.

If you want to humanize the Holocaust, and remind people that the faceless statistics they learned about in school (well, some schools. Others teach the Holocaust well, to be fair) were real people with real lives, strengths, flaws, dreams, petty grudges, loves, etc, that is useful and important work. Humanizing Hitler is both uncessary, and ultimately dangerous. It's not just about shying away from his evil, though that often happens in media that seeks to humanize evil. See, reddit posts about how much Hitler loved dogs. See also, the myth that all villains are the hero of their own story. No, many simply don't care at all about whether their actions are good, and only care about what benefits them.

Polanski isn't as important, but at the same time, what he did is rather common. It's disgustingly ordinary. And yes, people need to realize that someone they know, like, trust, and respect, can be a child raping monster. But I don't think we need to give Polanski any sympathy or empathy in order to do that.

While our games have monsters, in the real world, we just have people. Every monstrous thing done in history was done by a human being.

Failing to see monsters as people means you won't recognize them for what they are. "Oh, he couldn't be like that! He was such a nice man!" And every time you lump human monstrosity under some other name, (like "mentally ill") you add to ill-informed preconceptions that hurt more people than they help.

You cannot prevent monstrosity unless you understand it, and to do that you must look at it as truthfully as possible.

That doesn't mean you forgive.

I agree. See above for why I don't think that means we need media that humanizes them.